The 10 best social products that use Gamification to literally save the world

As a Gamification Pioneer, one of the most common responses I get when I tell people about Gamification is some version of, “Interesting. But how can something like video games really create value in real-world important things?” In other words, “I’m going to be polite to you, but I think this is a gimmicky fad that has no impact.”

Instead of trying to convince people with the same arguments over and over again, I’m going to settle this issue here once and for all – Gamification not only has real-life value and impact, it even saves lives and could ensure our future as a race!

Earlier I wrote about Old Spice’s Genius Gamification Marketing Campaign DIKEMBE MUTOMBO’S 4 1/2 WEEKS TO SAVE THE WORLD. While I think it is brilliant and does a lot of things well, I can assure you that it does NOT really save the world, outside of making more men smell like an adventure and bake gourmet cakes with the kitchens they made with their own hands.

But the 10 Examples below will blow your mind away and show you why Good Gamification, or “Human-Focused Design” (as opposed to Function-Focused Design”), undeniably has a role in “adding more lives” to our future.

Gamification Example 1: Puzzle Game FoldIt made breakthrough in AIDS Research that Scientists couldn’t solve

By 2009, AIDS has already killed 30 Million people, or close to the equivalent of the State of California. As of 2010, there are still 34 Million people that have contracted HIV. For 15 years, many of the top PhD Scientists in the world were trying to decipher a crystal structure for one of the AIDS-causing viruses called the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV), but could not solve it.

Luckily, the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science (yes, such center exists) collaborated with the Biochemistry department and created FoldIt, an online puzzle video game about protein folding. Foldit utilizes a game-like puzzle interface that allows people from all over the world to “play” and compete in figuring out various protein structures that fit a researcher’s criteria.

To everyone’s surprised, with over 240,000 “players” registering for the game and competing viciously against each other, a solution to the structure of the M-PMV was found in 10 days, creating a major breakthrough in the AIDS research field. 15 Years vs 10 Days? I would say for this alone Gamification added extremely concrete value to the world and could one day save a loved one.

Along the lines of FoldIt, Pain Squad is a “mobile game” designed to help kids fight cancer better by providing the patients with purpose and the researchers with data. In 2007, cancer was the cause of 13% of all human deaths (or 7.9M people). Fighting cancer is not only painful, it could be lonely and full of despair. To better treat children patients, doctors need patients to keep a “pain journal” everyday to see what is working and what is not.

However, kids are generally too tired to keep a journal and only record data occasionally, which makes the data completely useless. Toronto-based company Cundari created a role-playing cop game with missions and rewards, as well as police encouragement videos to motivate these children to log their pains twice a day for 2 weeks.

Turns out, this game not only provided doctors with all the data they need for better research and care, it made children excited and fought their pains with a purpose. They now are not simply victims of cancer but detectives that is baring some pain to help humanity defeat cancer once and for all!

Studies show that the activity rate for children between 9-15 have decreased by 60%, leading to obesity, diabetes or even worse diseases. I introduced Zamzee in an earlier blogpost, along with an Octalysis analysis, but basically Zamzee is a device that clips onto kids and tracks their activities when they run around – somewhat like the Nike+ FuelBand but cheaper for kids and has missions that are designed to get kids excited.

Kids can upload their activity data onto a website and see how many points they received and whether they have accomplished interesting challenges as well as earned badges. Amazingly, Zamzee has concrete data to show that the activity rate of children increased by 59%, a very sizeable increase that will help encourage kids to go to the gym more when they grow up.

When you ask kids these days, “What is work?” They will say, “School.” If you asked them “What is play?” they will often say, “Video games!” I believe human’s have an innate DESIRE to learn, but for some reason current school systems does not motivate children to learn the way they’re supposed to. What makes matter worse is that many schools are getting their budgets cut, with teachers being laid off and children not getting properly educated.

In comes Khan Academy. What used to just be a guy teaching math on YouTube became a huge collection of over 3000 educational videos on math, physics, chemistry, finance, and a lot more, with millions of people learning from it. Khan Academy utilizes lots of game mechanics such as “skill-growth trees” to unlock new classes and learn new skills. Many have said that they couldn’t imagine themselves ever enjoying or being good at math, but now their world has changed, thanks to some great teaching skills by Khan, and a little bit of Gamification.

Gamification Example 5: CrowdRise turns Charitable donations into a Game

CrowdRise is a platform that Gamifies charity. People create their pages and profiles, and they can accumulate points and match up against others on a leaderboard based on how much they can fundraise.

Of courses, they don’t use very advanced Gamification techniques and simply stick to basic PBL (points, badges + leaderboards), but with some Epic Meaning & Calling on top of some celebrity power, CrowdRise managed to attract over 33M players and have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for non-profits worldwide.

Gamification Example 6: SuperBetter makes you Recover from Setbacks and Supercharges your Life.

Through the process of forming alliances, using power packs, and defeating bad guys, she recovered from her illness and is now spreading the healing power of games to everyone who needs it.

The site is generally well designed, but it has some Ocean Paralysis towards the end of Onboarding. Of course, when you are curing people from a life-changing illness or setback, that hardly is an obstacle.

Energy is a serious issue in the world. It powers a nation’s efficiency to produce and transport, but also leads to war in some cases. OPower works to solve these problems by utilizing gamification to encourage people to use less energy. OPower works with utility companies to provide households with data on how much energy they are consuming, how they match up with neighbors, and if they are close to any new milestones.

Compellingly, people are consuming on average 2% less energy, which in 2012 led to over 1 Terawatt of energy savings in the world. This equates to $120,000,000 in utility bill savings, and decreased polluions equivalent of keeping 100,000 cars off the road.

Gamification Example 8: RecycleBank saves the environment by rewarding points that can be redeemed for goods

Perhaps not obvious to many, but there’s also a serious trash problem in the world. 195 Million Tons of Trash are tossed out by American’s alone each year. The trash needs to go somewhere, and they generally go into landfills. The problem is, many products can take 100-400 years to decompose, and we are slowly running out of landfill space. In 1988, there were about 4,000 landfills in the United States. Just 10 years after, in 1998, we only had 2,514 landfills left. In 2010, we dropped to 1,908. Starting to sense a problem here?

RecycleBank was created to encourage people to recycle more and reduce landfill trash by awarding points for recycling, saving energy, and answering sustainability quizzes and pledges. Points are redeemable for actual goods at WalMart, BestBuy and more places, as city government pays RecycleBank for reducing landfill waste. The project is backed by Al Gore and how won numerous awards in innovation, sustainability, and business. It now has 3 Million members and over 180 employees pushing the recycling envelope further.

Gamification Example 9: m.Paani aims to solve the clean-water problem in third world nations through an innovative loyalty program

In many third world countries, many people lack clean drinkable water, while others walk over 4 hours everyday to get clean water for the villages. A billion people in this world (that’s 1/7th of the world) do not have access to clean water, with 2.2M of them dying every year due to water-related diseases.

The crazy thing is, people in these third world countries own mobile phones. In fact, more people own mobile phones than toilets. m.Paani implements a very innovative loyalty program, where by purchasing mobile credits from sponsoring companies, individuals earn points towards sanitization products or water-related infrastructure for the entire village.

Alone the lines of solving the water problem is solving world hunger. Every year, 15 Million children die from starvation, while another billion people having less than $1 a day to buy food. Almost 50% of the human population live on less than $2 a day.

Similar to what was said about Kiva, people are spending their time playing games instead of helping the poor, so FreeRice created a quiz game where each time you answered a question correctly, FreeRice will buy 10 grains of rice, which are paid for by the sponsors of the site. Now here’s a win-win, the user improves his/her education from answering these questions, hungry people get fed, and sponsors get their promotional bang for the buck.

The site was later donated to the United Nations World Food Programme. To date, FreeRice has donated 6100 metric TONS of rice, consisting of 93 billion grains of rice and enough to feed 10 million people.

With so many Gamification examples, this is too legit to quit

It’s hard to argue against these examples being extremely positive for our society and well-being. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Dozens of new examples are being created every month. Gamified products that help with fitness, getting out of debt, doing chores, cleaning up the environment, you name it.

What we’re seeing here is a complete shift from things we “should do” to things we “want to do.” But instead of shifting the tasks, we simply make what we should do fun.

Imagine a world where kids can save lives, get healthier, bond with family and even make a living by playing World of Warcraft. My vision for Gamification is a future where no one really works, but everyone plays and contributes to a happier and more productive society.

Let’s hope this is not just a fad.

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81 thoughts on “The 10 best social products that use Gamification to literally save the world”

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Is there any research on which cultural groups are most amenable to gamification and which aren’t?

I’ve been really fortunate to travel a good deal on business (not as much a Yu-Kai though) and for some “tasks” there seems to be a cultural willingness to accept new rules while others have to be coaxed/coached into them.

Recycling for example is hugely different in Germany than it is here in California. In Germany one simply must place the correct recyclables in the correct container or face a fine (CD6?), but the Germans don’t seem interested in arguing about it, they get on with it.

In California I seem to hear a lot of grumbling about recycling. Part of it may be the “you can’t tell me what to do” syndrome and another part of it may be that because resources have generally been highly available, there was no “imperative” to recycle.

Are there any documented cultural differences that need to be accounted for in designing gamification?

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